Who now wants to see a city centre brought to a standstill, police taunted and windows broken – even in the cause of well-founded protest? Oddly, I spent the morning of 11 September walking with members of Reclaim the Streets and similar groups, chatting to veterans of Genoa and the May Day protests about the anti-corporate movement. That protest – a fiesta of life against death, as it was billed – had been organised in response to the opening of the international arms fair in London's Docklands.I was gathering material about how useful it was to see the arms trade being put under the spotlight by the protests Many of the protesters had come dressed in pink and silver. There were bands, dancing, pushchairs, and urgent discussions about the evil of the arms trade and whether the police would let one out to go to the loo.Then, at the end of the march, there was a little podium and speeches Somebody from CND was speaking when the news came in. He announced that an airplane had been flown into the World Trade Centre The crowd around me cheered Yes, they cheered. Move over Jo Moore, this was the most embarrassing response in Britain.
Nobody there had any idea of the carnage that was going on, but a sense of heightened excitement fizzed in the air. Nothing could have exposed more clearly the limitations of some elements of the anti-corporate movement. This was what had boxed up part of the movement into a dead end – an appetite for disruption and purely symbolic actions, displayed in that sudden flare of excitement over the image of the Twin Towers toppling.But let's not exaggerate: that's only one element of the energy that fuels the protesters And it really isn't the most important element No, the core of the movement has a vital future. It doesn't matter if the big street protests, such a feature at Seattle in 1999 and Genoa in 2001, go into abeyance for a bit They had their positive effects. But many people had been saying for a long time that all the attention focused on trouble in the streets was only distracting activists, commentators and policy-makers from the more important issues.And those issues haven't gone away. In this world that is meant to have changed so much, the world-after-11-September, nothing on this agenda has changed substantially. The demands are still there, being voiced as fiercely as possible by developing countries and their supporters.The reality behind the debate is as urgent as ever.
As these negotiations open in Doha, we mustn't forget why it was that the last attempt failed in Seattle in 1999. It was because the richest countries had failed to realise that they had fallen out of step with the rest of the world. The Zimbabwean delegate Yash Tandon said those talks ran into the ground "mainly because the bigger players refused to take into account the concerns of Africa. Africa found it necessary to say, 'If you are not going to take us seriously, then we are not going to be with you.'"Are there signs that the most powerful players in the WTO are listening this time? The words of representatives of the poorest countries suggest not.
